Quick Start

Building a blimp from scratch is not easy, but with our quick start. You can easily build your own blimp.

Step 1: Build your blimp

To quickly build your own blimp:

Purchase the off-the-shelf balloon that we are most recommended: Remote Control Shark Toy Inflatable Air Shark Balloon RC Blimp Fish Toy
Take out the balloon envelope and inflate it with Helium gas. Use this link to buy one if you don't have helium.
Make sure your blimp is fully inflated and after you inflate your blimp, your blimp should look like this:

Tie it with string for future use.

Step 2: Build electronics

To build the whole electronics system:

Purchase all the electronics: feather board esp32, motor driver board, DC motors + propellers
Build your gondola using our 3D printed files
To connect and wire these materials, check hardware assembly
Put these hardware on the shark fish balloon with velcro tape, you need to follow the instructions in the hardware assembly.

Step 3: Build software

Requirements

To get started, the following requirements should be fulfilled.

Arduino IDE Install Arduino IDE on your laptop and this is for uploading our program to the board
Python Python3.7 or higher version is required for full functions. We recommend you install Anaconda

Software setup

There are two things that you need to setup: Arduino IDE and your python environment.

To set up featherboard ESP32, you need to follow the setup guidance. For more details, you can check the full tutorials.
As for python environment, here we will use Anaconda as example. To setup Anaconda on windows , Linux and macOS.

Installation

First, download OpenBlimp github to your local folder if you haven’t done it. To clone repository:

git clone https://github.com/zhz03/OpenBlimp.git
cd OpenBlimp

Make sure you are in the root dir of OpenCDA, and next let’s install the dependencies. We highly recommend use conda environment to install.

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate openblimp

If conda install failed, install through pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Upload program to Featherboard ESP32:

Code Structure

root
├───docs
│   ├───Demo
│   └───javascripts
├───Hardware
│   ├───3d_design
│   │   └───origami structure
│   ├───circuit_plot_doc
│   └───Images
│       ├───assembly
│       ├───cases
│       ├───motor_propellers
│       ├───prepare
│       └───sensors
├───imgs
└───openblimp
    ├───auto_control
    ├───basic_control
    ├───Images
    │   └───communication
    └───manual_control
        └───arduino_code

Note:

Hardware directory contains all the hardware files like: 3D design files, hardware images, other hardware related files
openblimp directory contains all the software files and code.